Author Archives: Tim Lenton

This is Paston Year. You may have missed the announcement as the bells rang to usher it in, or maybe it was drowned by the sound of fireworks.

Perhaps you don’t live in Norfolk. Well, that is your bad luck. Norfolk has everything except mountains. Mountains, glaciers, penguins, deserts and … OK, the world is full of things that Norfolk doesn’t have. But we do have a beautiful coastline, lovely countryside, the Broads, a fine city, Keith Skipper and a very relaxed way of life. Oh, and the Pastons.

Exactly 600 years ago the first Paston Letter was written. The country at a literary level  was still steeped in French and Latin at the time, and the Paston Letters were among the first written in English, mostly in the 15th century. They were preserved in what might be described as a miraculous way – lost and then found, dispersed and then gathered together.

The Pastons themselves rose from being yeomen farmers in remote North-East Norfolk to court favourites during the time of the Wars of the Roses and beyond. They were often lawyers, and they married very astutely, gathering land and money, power and influence – often in the face of stiff opposition. Eventually they became Earls of Yarmouth and then – out of the blue – they lost everything. It’s a compelling story and one that will be told in many ways this year.

I have to confess an interest. I am a trustee of the Paston Heritage Society, which, together with the University of East Anglia, has been awarded a substantial sum by the Heritage Lottery Fund to run a three-year project involving nearly a dozen centres in the county.

This year the emphasis is on an extensive exhibition at St Peter Hungate Church in Norwich, which was the Pastons’ parish church when they lived in Elm Hill, perhaps the most picturesque street in the city. There will also be a prestigious exhibition at the Castle Museum – an exhibition shared with Yale University in America. It centres on the mysterious painting called The Paston Treasure.

If you are interested, you can read all about this elsewhere, primarily on the Paston website and Facebook page. You can get involved. In fact, please do. I mention it here because it is one of those important and fascinating things that sometimes don’t get the publicity they deserve.

You know – like Norwich City.

Television can be a dreadful waste of time, but good television is worth its weight in gold. This is what is known as a bad metaphor, because you can’t weigh broadcasting in the physical sense, but I think a bad metaphor sometimes says exactly what you mean. So there it is.

What television does really well, in a golden way, is drama. A good story told and acted well is a joy, and pretty much the only thing that makes me cry. There, I’ve said it.

I don’t cry out of sadness, but usually for one of three reasons: because someone has behaved in a way that is profoundly good; because love has triumphed against the odds; or because something unbelievably beautiful has occurred. As Lady Julian of Norwich almost said, we suddenly see that all is well, all will be well and all manner of thing will be well.

You may think that is a pretty high mark to aim at, but all good drama does this to a greater or lesser extent. Which is why I was so disappointed by the much-hyped Bancroft, recently aired on ITV.

“Disappointed” does not really get across the emotions I felt when the last episode reached its dire conclusion. Maybe “intensely annoyed”, “furious” and “very, very angry” come closer.

As human beings we have some basic needs. We need to see good triumph over evil, love and forgiveness conquer fear, and innocence prevail over corruption. Because this does not always happen in everyday life, we need to see it happen in our stories. That is what stories are for. It is what the Christmas story – the kernel of all stories – is about.

Bancroft turned that on its head (I would say spoiler alert, but if I stop you watching it, I’m doing you a favour) by allowing corruption to triumph, a double (possibly triple) murderer  to succeed and those doing good to get trampled into the dirt.

In case you think this is a neat twist and rather clever, let me disabuse you. It is OK for evil to succeed for a while if there is something redemptive in it. Peaky Blinders is an example, and there are many others. It is OK to portray a realistic, corrupt world as a setting for the story. It is OK for wicked individuals to have some success if underneath it all the universal virtues are clearly visible.

Bancroft herself (played by Sarah Parish) has almost no redeeming features and does not suffer for her machinations, other than to have her son reject her, which seems to have little effect. I’m not sure what the author was trying to achieve. Someone suggested that he was setting up a second series, but as far as I and many others are concerned, all he’s made sure of is that we won’t watch it.

Call me Scrooge, but there are certain things I could do without at Christmas time.

One is companies who try to persuade me to buy things I quite obviously don’t want, just so that they can be delivered in time for Christmas.

They and others of similar ilk might like to know that I do not consider 12 December to be “last-minute shopping”. Last-minute shopping is the afternoon of Christmas Eve which, incidentally, is quite a good time to shop because there’s no-one about.

One company (one?) warns me that time is ticking, and I should therefore check out last-minute deals. Time may be ticking, but time always ticks, unless you mute it. That’s what it does. I do not want a last-minute deal, last-minute flowers, last-minute accommodation or half-price gifts.

And just because it’s Christmas, it doesn’t mean I want to book up next year’s holiday. In fact it’s probably the last thing I want to do.

Almost the last thing. The very, very last thing I want to do is go to Santa’s Grotto for Dogs. I am sad to say there is one in Norwich, my home town, and a lot of people seem to think it’s a good idea.

What is this all about? There are no dogs in the Christmas story, and there were no dogs at the birth of Jesus. Come to that there there was no Santa either, no grotto and almost certainly no cows. I just throw that in in the interests of accuracy. There were definitely sheep. I have a lot of time for sheep.

What else do I find irritating? David Attenborough. But that’s another story.

If I were Scottish, I might be a little annoyed by the courier service. Apparently the people living in Moray, north-east Scotland, have been reclassified as islanders by a certain delivery firm.

This is not a marginal point. There is no causeway involved. It’s a bit like saying South Wales is an island or, if you happen to live in Norfolk, North Norfolk District Council.

Customers ordering online from the north and north-east of Scotland apparently pay up to four times for delivery compared to the rest of the UK. And you can see how that could be useful to certain people.

“North of Edinburgh? Must be an island, mate. Special needs. I mean rates.”

Unsurprisingly, Moray’s MP has suggested that geography lessons may be required. Last-minute ones, I suggest. Time is ticking.

We approached Little Gidding across the Fens, through Ramsey and into the middle of nowhere.

This particular Nowhere, in case you should stumble into it, is a stunning piece of countryside away from the bustle of suburbs and motorways, – a distance measured not so much in miles as in degrees of reality.

It is not far south-west of where my great-grandfather – and probably his father – lived and died. That was Norman’s Cross, and it has been pretty much brushed out of the landscape by the A1(M). But it nudges up against Folksworth, which is where those two ancestors are buried, the wording on their tombstones fading visibly in the short time since I had seen them last.

We ate Sunday lunch there, in the Fox – which I can recommend highly.

I had been rather embarrassed about originating from an area I had regarded as “near Peterborough”, which seemed about as boring a bit of Middle England as you could get. Having spent a couple of days at Little Gidding, which my ancestors must have known, I feel rather differently.

Some of this comes from reading the poem of the same name – the last of T S Eliot’s magical Four Quartets, which contains the same quiet beauty as the place itself. We read it right through on the Sunday morning in Ferrar House, a matter of yards from the beautiful little church dedicated to St John, with whom Eliot had much in common. Use of words, most obviously.

From the same house the previous day we had watched a rather haphazard attempt at a hunt, with horses and dogs milling about and another fox racing across the middle distance. Not my choice of Saturday afternoon leisure, but it reinforced the “nowhere” feeling. Or maybe it was “somewhere else”. Maybe it didn’t happen. Who knows?

The following day we took the short, slightly muddy walk up to Steeple Gidding, with its empty, pewless church and wonderful views. And after lunch in the Folksworth Fox we slipped on to that destructive A1(M) and headed south towards Cambridge.

A quicker route, but cruel: sadly, and without warning, Nowhere vanished.

A list is doing the rounds of what might make the news in the year 2030. You know the kind of thing – “Baby conceived naturally: scientists stumped”; “Average weight of a British male drops to 18 stone”.

Chaos is clearly on the way, as it has been for so long. I suspect, however, that it is nearer than we might have thought.

Already the police have more or less abandoned their traditional roles. I understand that ordinary, untrained people with plenty of axes to grind are sporting video cameras with which to trap unwary motorists and others – even cyclists and, in some cases, actual criminals. Evidence from these cameras can in some cases be accepted in court. Technologically speaking, it can only get worse.

No-one ever sees a police officer on the beat nowadays, unless there is a football match or concert in the vicinity.

Parliament is apparently about to fall apart because no-one can tell the difference between flirting and inappropriate touching. I once asked a female friend about this, and she said it depended on whether the man was attractive, which seems unfair, but I’m not sure who on.

This is not to excuse anyone who actually assaults a woman sexually, which is despicable at all levels. I know a few women who would leave such a perpetrator with serious injuries – and good luck to them. Bullies are pathetic, which is sad, as there are so many of them, and most of them are in positions of power.

Which reminds me of the old quote: “The wrong people are in power because they would not be in power if they were not the wrong people.”

Meanwhile it will not be long before the world is ruled by lobby groups. I am constantly being asked to add my name to an online petition – often one where I cannot possibly know whether or not it is justified. I am sure many people sign such petitions purely because they sound right, or because it makes them feel better.

As I write, Avaaz – perhaps the most vocal such group – is crowing that “we could be about to beat Monsanto, crumbling the cornerstone of its billion-dollar empire”! Why? Because Monsanto produces “toxic mega-killer glyphosate”.

Obviously toxic mega-killers are bad. Anyone could tell you that. And if enough people sign a petition, politicians terrified by popular pressure will ban glyphosate, which is a rather successful herbicide, improving our ability to feed people.

Why don’t Avaaz like it? Well, it’s been classified as probably carcinogenic, on the same level as – wait for it – night shifts, alcoholic beverages and solar radiation (sunlight).

I’m not a scientist; so I don’t know whether glyphosate is more or less dangerous than sunlight. But I do know that getting gullible people to sign that kind of a petition is simply attempting to bully your way to getting what you want.

And that is what chaos is all about. No rule, no law, no love. Just bullying.